How is Costa Rica any different than Panama, Nicaragua, or neighboring South American countries with elevation? The roads are terrible all around, nothing special to Costa Rica.

San Jose is completely different than the pacific cities. For the most part the main roads are decent but the dirt roads into the jungle are just that, jungle dirt roads.

Why would you drive at lot at night?

Did you go to any costal cities or stay in the mountains?

What kind of expectations did you have for developing world jungle roads?

I spent a week staying at a place 10 minutes from Jaco in late 2022. Our hosts were invaluable in helping us get acclimated to the driving. Key takeaways:

- Watch the car in front of you very carefully when on the main highway. If they swerve, you should swerve too because they're likely avoiding a pothole that you could fit a cow in.

- Don't follow too close on the main highway. Drivers will often stop with no warning to chat with a friend they see walking along the road.

- If you do suddenly slow down put your hazard lights on. Without your hazards on people will rear-end you and then blame you. Note that this doesn't apply to people who see a friend walking along the road and want to have a chat.

- Go very slowly on roads off the main highway. "Paved" doesn't mean "maintained", and it's not uncommon to see paved roads with potholes that you can't see the bottom of.

I suspect the sheer amount of water coming down from the sky and flowing across the ground makes fighting potholes a losing battle. Our host was very proud that lane lines had just been repainted in the last year, but they were already faded to basically being invisible in places.

We survived, but at one point we hit a pothole so hard our bluetooth skipped.

That’s a great summary of my trip there, too! Getting around even within a city (even Alajuela/San Jose) was painful.

I wouldn’t say it was as expensive as the Bay Area, though. You can’t find, say, a Baldi spa hotel like experience in the Bay Area for $100/night.

There are pockets of CR that from a tourist's perspective can feel as expensive as the Bay Area. There's a whole industry that caters specifically to that.

My wife, son and I live a US middle-class lifestyle here and our total expenses are ~30% cheaper than living in an expensive part of Colorado. It's certainly not cheap, but we could definitely pare down expenses pretty quickly if we needed to.

I love the Bali themed hotels in the mountains here. And yes, we've paid ~$100/night for this.

For the exact opposite road experience visit Iceland.

I was pleasantly surprised by the roads in Malaysia. We were doing the equivalent of 80MPH on the main N-S road between Kuala Lumpur and Penang and dudes would blow past us in a Toyota Hi-Ace minivan doing 100MPH. Some of the best roads I've ever driven on, even better than the roads in Texas. Heading up into the mountains to see the tea plantations, even the secondary roads were at least two lanes and well marked, but well maintained, even if it was impossible to pass slow-moving trucks.

> even better than the roads in Texas

fun fact: the US has terrible roads (in a Western sense) too

the US is more comparable to a continent or part of the world than a country in terms of variety of roads you get

In general this isn't true though. Especially not when you consider the massive geography.

The roads in the northeast are awful. It hardly ever freezes in Texas and almost never is the frost line more than an inch deep so many roads go decades between needing repair or rebuild. Bad roads exist but I specified Texas for a reason

Oh well, I remember dirt roads and river crossings. Of course not inside Reykjavik but some sections of the ring road around the island were unpaved in 2004. Not a big deal. Ah, and twisted winding roads across lava fields (cold ones.) That vacation was great.

But if you think Costa Rica is expensive, prices in Iceland will surely offend.

As an Australian who visited Iceland and drove a lot there, I was very impressed with Iceland’s roads. They face some similar challenges to Australia: geographic distribution requires a lot of road for not many people. (https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/stats/Transport/Hi... Iceland has ~45km of highway per 1k people, Australia has ~43km of highway per 1k. Canada is the only other country above 40km/1k people. America is representative of the top 10% at 16th with ~23km/1k, 80% of countries have less than 10km/1k, and 50% of countries have less than 5km/1k. The bottom extreme of 1km/1k or less is also interesting - you see expected places like Singapore and Hong Kong but also oddities like Egypt and China. I would be curious to get reports from Canadians and Estonians on their opinions of their country’s roads.)

Of course, Iceland has added constraints of deep freeze / unfreeze cycle and heavy snowfall. They performed admirably well. I particularly enjoyed their solution to the river crossing issue - Iceland has a ‘ring road’ that aims to connect essentially the entire country, and this road has to cross many rivers. Like, SO many rivers, it feels like once every dozen kilometers or something. Their efficient solution was one-lane bridges - sometimes you have to wait for oncoming traffic to vacate the bridge before you can cross.

>I would be curious to get reports from Canadians and Estonians on their opinions of their country’s roads

Canadian checking in.

Having driven all over the eastern half our country and a few places in the western half as well as much of the eastern half of America I much prefer Canada's.

Small things like how quickly it seems roadkill is cleaned up here as opposed to America. There are still many places where we do not have divided highway and it's just a single lane in each direction but that is slowly and steadily being changed out to a divided 2/3 lanes in each direction setup.

There is construction and maintence delays (looking at you quebec) but overall things work pretty well.

Counter that to places in America (looking at you Michigan) where driving can feel like it's going to shake the nuts off your car, and then you cross a border into say Ohio and everything is back to normal :)

>There are still many places where we do not have divided highway and it's just a single lane in each direction but that is slowly and steadily being changed out to a divided 2/3 lanes in each direction setup.

Does this include the TCH? The average American who sees it on a map (or the average Ontarian who never leaves the Windsor-Quebec City belt) assumes that it's like a US interstate, as opposed to in many places traffic lights, private driveways opening onto it, and (as you say) one lane in each direction.

>Having driven all over the eastern half our country and a few places in the western half as well as much of the eastern half of America I much prefer Canada's.

I have heard that Canada's portion of the Alaska Highway is terrible compared to the US portion, presumably because the US portion is held to Interstate standards.

>Counter that to places in America (looking at you Michigan) where driving can feel like it's going to shake the nuts off your car, and then you cross a border into say Ohio and everything is back to normal

Roads in Canada are 100% provincial matters (which is why the TCH isn't like Interstates). I would be surprised if there isn't a Canadian province that is Michigan's equivalent compared to its peers.

In my limited experience, Michigan has no peers. It's a uniquely brutal place to drive.

Not all of the Alcan is bad, but it's worse the further north you get. Alaskan roads are generally not built to Interstate standards, mostly being two-lane undivided highways. In general the US side is probably marginally better but neither side stands out as being particularly good; road maintenance at those latitudes is challenging.

I drove all over Costa Rica for a week, we were trying to go to a zoo or something but ended up in Nicaraguan border after getting lost.

I drove round Costa Rica on holiday for 2 weeks. Google Maps worked just fine with destinations (usually hotels/lodges) and I didn't notice anything different about addresses. The roads seemed OK too - apart from some crazy truck drivers. Weird how we had such a different experience.

> I didn't notice anything different about addresses

I mean.. they don't have any. So maybe you didn't pay attention. Sure, if you're typing in the name of a tourist destination, that's fine. But how do you find a person's house?

In CR the addresses are referential. So you might live "300 meters south of the retirement home, 100 East, red door".

Do you live in a place with no addresses? In CR they literally don’t have street addresses like “123 Main St”. Or at least not that people actually use.

Yeah same. Went there, rented a car, drove from San Juan down to some national park in the south, stayed at a resort a few days, drove back. Nothing particularly notable, and no things did not seem expensive. Yeah there were some touts, but I've seen worse. I will say it was funny how beat to hell my rental car came. The check out sheet had multiple Xs drawn on every single panel for pre-existing damage.

For someone who's widely traveled I can't imagine you'd have any trouble with Costa Rica at all. It felt safe at least.

I wonder how much has changed - I visited back in '07 and felt like Costa Rica was incredibly affordable, although I've heard it's gotten more expensive as it's gotten more popular. I ate plenty of casado plates for about $3, stayed in some (quite rustic) places I think as low as $15/night, traveled between towns via public bus for a couple bucks per trip, etc.

Although, after suffering through a few long, hot, cramped bus journeys, on my last day I booked the Grey Line tourist van for the first time on the trip - I got a ride directly from Tamarindo to the San Jose airport, in air-conditioned comfort, for like $15. It took like half as long as the public buses would have, and it was comfortable, and I didn't regret making my travel "less authentic" at all.

Oh, it looks like the place I remember being $15/night is now up to $26/night, although I think they've spruced it up a bit too: https://www.losminerosguesthouse.com/losminerosguesthouse-1

This couldn't be more different than the trip I made to CR back in 2019. Picked up a car from the airport (Hertz or Enterprise IIRC), drove around the whole time and MOST of the roads were well paved for driving, even without a 4x4. Stopped at random shacks on the street and picked up plates of the day which were all delicious, and servers who were overtly courteous. Only place we saw traffic was in central San Jose.

We did the tourist track of Arenal/Alajuela/Poas and then also spent a few days on the "road less traveled" but at no point did I really feel unsafe. Sure, it's not always 8-lane highways, but roads are more than decent and considering the immense natural beauty and wildlife, it felt wrong to even expect highways to be there.

I happily tell folks that Costa Rica was one of my favorite countries to visit (and make sure you keep sipping on Fresca and their incredible coffee while you are there!). To each his own I guess.

I went with my family as a child. I remember it being night, and pouring rain. We got to a road that was completely washed out with like a mini river running through it and a huge gap. A random guy had two boards over the gap and was helping guide people's cars over the two boards, cars dangling over the rushing water in pitch black.

I've been back as an adult (and I'm visiting next week!) and it's an amazing place with beautiful people. But you do have to adapt to it a little, unlike so many other tourist destinations where you never have to. Not a bad thing.

The "plates of the day" are just rice and beans, with maybe some plantains, fish or chicken, and lettuce on the side. Costa Rican food is a joke. The variations come down to whether you want the beans on the left side of the rice or on the right side of the rice.

Almost like Brazilian food